The Physiology of the Citizen

Abstract

There is no coherent, singular temporal language in modernity. Instead, moderns have invented at least three incommensurable temporal languages. There is, for one, a temporal language of universal progress, one that harnesses the present to the gradual materialization of a distant, Kantian-like highest good. Following this language, we promote the universal application of human rights or transnational ethical responsibility in matters such as famine or civil war. Contemporaneously, moderns also invented a second language, one that marries the present to a particular moment in the distant past. They embrace the notion of what Benjamin called nowtime (Jetztzeit), wherein different historical epochs are attracted to and illuminate the meaning imbued in each other. Perhaps only this fragmented and semicyclical temporal vision can explain a phenomenon such as the Zionist revolution. Yet moderns also developed a third temporal language that is present fixated and pictures human beings as locked within compressed temporal horizons. The origins and political implications of this third language are the subject of this essay. It examines, in particular, the relation between present-centeredness and a notion of the extended future, asking why moderns came to develop what de Tocqueville characterized as their brutish indifference about the future.'